This is the twelfth of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. Still trying for clarity.
In this installment, I’m still addressing his second chapter, and his laundry list of joke techniques, which he is trying to narrow down to a few meta-types. We’ve moved on to the “Techniques of conceptual jokes,” which he says rely more on the situation for their humor.
Techniques of conceptual jokes
Freud characterizes these conceptual jokes as “mak[ing] use of deviations from normal thinking,” (42) and ultimately arrives at five categories: displacement, absurdity, faulty reasoning, unification, and indirect representation. Now up is indirect representation, and its subsets, allusion, “synecdoche” and analogy.
Indirect Representation
Freud’s next category is of allusion, or reference to something not present. He later says,
I have occasionally described allusion as indirect representation‘; and we may now observe that the various species of allusion, together with representation by the opposite and other techniques that have still to be mentioned, may be united into a single large group, for which indirect representation‘ would be the most comprehensive name. (59)
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Connection or allusion
If representation by the opposite is one of the technical methods of jokes, we can expect that jokes may also make use of its contrary – representation by something similar or akin…. We shall describe the peculiarity of this technique far more appropriately if, instead of representation by something “akin,” we say by something “correlated” or “connected.” (54)
Freud relates this technique to that of allusion, but without the double meaning; in this technique, “its characteristic is replacement by something linked to it in a conceptual connection” (55-56). These are parallel to verbal techniques, particularly resemblance in sound, slight modifications, and omissions
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- Resemblance in sound
The connection used for the replacement may be merely a resemblance in sound, so that this sub-species becomes analogous to puns among verbal jokes. Here, however, it is not the resemblance in sound between two words, but between whole sentences, characteristic phrases, and so on.
For instance, Lichtenberg coined the saying: “New spas cure well,” which at once reminds us of the proverb: “New brooms sweep clean.” (56)
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- Slight modifications
The connection may also consist in similarity except for a “slight modification.” So that this technique, too, is parallel to a verbal technique. (56)
Example:
“Every fathom a queen,” a modification of Shakespeare‘s familiar “Every inch a king.” (56).
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- Omission
Finally, another kind of allusion consists in “omission,” which may be compared to condensation without the formation of a substitute. Actually, in every allusion something is omitted, viz. the train of thought leading to the allusion. It only depends on whether the more obvious thing is the gap in the wording of the allusion or the substitute which partly fills the gap. Thus a series of examples would lead us back from blatant omission to allusion proper. (57)
Here among the jokes is another Jewish, bath-house joke:
And now once again two Jews outside the bath-house:
One of them sighed: “Another year gone by already!” (58)
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Synecdoche
Freud doesn’t name his next sub-species, so I’ll take the liberty. Synecdoche is “the part for the whole or the whole for the part.” This seems to be what Freud’s expressing when he says,
If we examine our material further, we seem to recognize a fresh sub-species of indirect representation…. This is representation by something small or very small – which performs the task of giving full expression to a whole characteristic by means of a tiny detail. This group can be brought under the classification of “allusion,” if we bear in mind that this smallness is related to what has to be represented, and can be seen to proceed from it. (59)
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Analogy
Freud characterizes analogies as a sub-set of indirect representation, and though he questions if analogies are even jokes at all (and spends a lot of time working through examples), he eventually finds a few. Freud quotes Heinrich Heine for the following:
Her face resembled a palimpsest, on which, beneath the fresh black monastic manuscript of the text of a Church Father there lurk the half-obliterated lines of an ancient Greek love poem.
Freud finds this and a few other analogies to possess, in and of themselves, a joking quality.
Summary
So indirect representation is the final technique by which the joker makes use of deviations from normal thinking within the situation to achieve humor.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
